Last Orders
by RobertSaysThis
Summary: The deadliest creatures will hide behind laughter and jokes. The strongest things in the universe will know not to speak their names. There was a Doctor who was not quite the Doctor. This is the story of how she began to end. (The 11th in a series about a different 13th Doctor, who had the same face but lived in a bleaker world.)
1. Chapter 1

Far from here there was a little girl, in a quiet classroom where there was no danger at all. She learned about space and the sea and the wider world, all the things she might never need to know.

And one day that girl would learn about a people, who had done such awful things they might not have been people at all. They had turned against their neighbours and gone to war, because they believed they were the only real people there really were. They had been powerful and they had been terrifying, and there were people still alive who had fought them. But the goodies had triumphed, in the end. That was how things happened in a children's story, and this had always been the story of a child.

Still, in her classroom that is now gone forever, that girl thanked the world that she had not lived in those days: that all soldiers were old and the monsters were dead and that peace would stretch on for forever. And so the days and years passed in their endless way, in a present she never imagined might one day turn into a future.


	2. Chapter 2

The Doctor was screaming like a broken person, and all of time had broken around her now. Along with her two companions she'd seen Ancient Rome destroyed, a hydrogen bomb exploding above it before even Julius Caesar had been born .

But the real past still existed anyway, somehow. It remained part of a cramping spacetime, which struggled to accommodate thousands of timelines that should never have happened at all.

Reality was collapsing. Perhaps it wasn't surprising that the Doctor had fallen apart as well. She loomed ancient and horrifying against the console's pine, no longer even bothering to pretend she could be human.

"You're scaring me!" Chris cried as something within the TARDIS groaned.

"You're scaring her!" said Chris's mum, ineffectively. You're scaring _me_. We just saw a _nuclear bomb_ go off, and it's _you_ who's scaring me!"

The Doctor laughed, a soft, hollow sound that didn't fit with someone so full of rage. Around her the TARDIS was bellowing like a storm giving birth to machines./

"Funny, isn't it?" she said. "Nuclear weapons. How they're always there beneath the surface, doing nothing. You forget they're there. And so you give the world a little prod, because nothing too bad's ever happened before…"

She laughed again, somehow even more quietly than before. Somewhere far away a bell was tolling, ringing against the howls and her grin.

"And the prod doesn't do anything!" laughed the Doctor. So you prod again, then _again_; 'cause it's not like the prodding is doing anything, right? So you keep poking and poking until one day everything _BREAKS"—_

She was roaring now and Chris was crying. Rain was splattering through the TARDIS in a way the Doctor had said was impossible, a downpour beneath the thunder and the bells—

"IT BREAKS!" the Doctor shouted again, "and just for a second you see the thing you've done! You see it and you beg, because it's just one little mistake, right? And now you _know_ and you'll never make it again, but you're begging to a thing that has more power than a rising sun, and it swallows you—"

–The bell rang out a final _bong_–

—"and nothing's the same again," said the Doctor as she collapsed down to the ground.

All noise vanished as the TARDIS came to a stop. All that was left was the sloshing of the fallen rain, making a musty smell as it soaked through the rugs on the floor.


	3. Chapter 3

Chris ran to the Doctor as she sobbed and gasped, hands and knees pressed to the weeping ground.

"Oh, God," said the Doctor. "I shouldn't cry!"

"It's fine to cry," said Chris. "Whoever you are."

"She's right," said Lorna apprehensively, "it is fine to cry. But it's less fine for someone who's thousands of years old to come to depend on my daughter."

The Doctor looked up into Lorna's eyes from the floor. "I'm sorry," she said. "I really am. I didn't mean to be… I didn't want to be that."

"We didn't want that, either," said Lorna coldly.

"You're angry," said Chris to the Doctor.

"Angrier than I've ever been. I think… that I might have needed to be. To get to this place. The centre of everything that's gone wrong."

On a glass panel in the TARDIS console a normal-looking street appeared, all glass fronts and cracked pavements. People who looked like _people_ were walking the streets in ordinary clothes, and in the air hung a thing like the end of the world.

"This place looks boring," said Chris.

"Everywhere's interesting under the surface," said the Doctor, looking at a display on the console. "And this place is no exception. The planet has a literary influence."

"They like books?" said Chris.

"They like _a_ book. A book from the Earth. I don't know which one; the dial on this isn't very good."

"You have a dial to tell you you're in a book?" said Lorna.

"You don't need a dial for _that!_" said the Doctor. "It's always pretty obvious when that happens. It's for when people are very into a book; build their whole world around it. Like a religion without the faith" – she wrinkled her nose – "but still with a lot of fanatics."

"What's that?" said Chris, pointing at the thing in the sky. It looked a bit like St. Paul's Cathedral might, if you'd thought to turn it upside down and suspend it in the air.

"It's a battle craft, with lasers pointing down," said the Doctor. "I don't know."

"And where's this?"

"I don't know that either. It's not part of space and time as you'd understand it. It's more of a possibility, and not a very possible one. If you smashed a mirror and went to the heart of the break, it's a place like this you'd find in the middle of the shards."

"It doesn't look very interesting," said Chris.

"It isn't!" said the Doctor, regaining some of her composure. "And I'm glad you said that, because you won't be going out there."

"Okay," said Chris.

"What?" said the Doctor.

"That's fine," said Chris. "I've not had a good time today; you've been really scary. And I saw a nuclear bomb go off. Now I can't stop thinking that one might go off over me."

The Doctor didn't look remotely angry anymore. She just looked sad, like something had been lost.

"Travelling in the TARDIS should be wonderful," she said. "No matter how scared you might feel. But it's too dangerous now, isn't it? You have to feel safe before you put yourself in danger. And there's something out there that makes nothing feel safe anymore"—

There was a knock at the TARDIS door, and both Chris and Lorna flinched.

"That's odd," said the Doctor as she drew out her sonic screwdriver. "I wasn't expecting visitors."

She walked slowly towards the door, the silence only broken by the sounds of the forest outside. She thrust the door open with one hand as she clenched her screwdriver tight in the other—

—To see a a man in a hi-vis jacket, who was looking a little confused.

"Postman," he said.

"What?" said the Doctor. "We've only been here five minutes! There's no way we could get any _post!_"

"That's none of my concern," said the man, handing over her letter.

She took the envelope from him that was simply labelled _DOCTOR, THE UGLY BOX_, and decided she was at the point of accepting things like this.

As she closed the door she opened the letter, then frowned.

"Chris, Lorna. Come'n look at this. It's an invitation." The two of them came over to her, Chris taking the letter and Lorna bending down to read:

_YOU ARE INVITED TO:_

_**THE END OF THE DOCTOR**_

_8PM AT CENTRAL THEATRE_

_ONE NIGHT ONLY_

"That looks like a trap," said Lorna.

"It looks _very_ like a trap!" said the Doctor. That's what makes it so clever. Most people would try and trick me a little, they'd think they might even succeed. But whoever sent this, they know it's better not to try. Because they'll send it, and know that I'll think _this_, and that of course I'll walk into it anyway. You have to, right? When the trap's set by someone so clever."

"That's…" Lorna tried to say the words _ingenious_ and _incredibly stupid_ at the same time, but her mouth just let out a strangled sound instead.

"This place," said the Doctor, "it's dangerous. I mean, of course it is; we don't go anywhere that isn't. But here…"

She gulped.

"I'm not sure I'm going to come back," she said. "And when I don't, I'm not sure anywhere will be safe. Not anymore. The TARDIS will take you to the safest place she can find. And maybe, hopefully, that'll be enough."

Her hands were in her pockets and she was looking at the ground.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I thought this time I'd get it right, once I knew how few chances I'd have left. And I do _want_ that, you must know that. Somewhere, maybe. Somewhere I got it right."

Lorna and her daughter looked at the Doctor coldly.

"You've put us through hell, Doctor," Lorna said.

"Yeah," said the Doctor sadly. "I did do that. Yes."

"You saved our lives," said Chris, who didn't sound so happy about that either.

"True," said the Doctor. "I did do that as well."

They all paused awkwardly, the only sound the rustling of the leaves.

"It's been bad and it's been good," said Lorna. "It needn't be one or the other. But I am glad we met you, in the end. And I hope you'll be alright."

"Don't die," said Chris.

"I'll try," said the Doctor. "It's all any of us can do."

"That's the world," said Lorna.

"The reality we're in now," said the Doctor as she looked through the TARDIS doors. The city outside was grey and unremarkable, and the most dangerous place she'd ever been.

The three of them looked at each other awkwardly, not knowing if they should hug, then did and found that the awkwardness didn't leave.

"Right," said the Doctor. "Off to save reality again. It's very regular, how that needs doing. Like hoovering."

Her friends looked uncomfortably at her and didn't smile.

"Well," she said. "Best be getting on."

She waved to them, then stepped out of the TARDIS for what might have been the last time.

"I trusted that woman with you, Chrissy," said her mum once the Doctor had gone. "I don't know if you can forgive me."

"She wasn't always so bad. She fought monsters in my head. Ones you were pretending weren't even there."

"And I love her for that," said Lorna. "I just sometimes wonder about the ones that only _she_ can see—"

"She wasn't frightened when I first met her. The world was about to end, but she didn't even seem scared."

"You're scared now, though, eh? After seeing her like that?"

Chris looked warily at her mother. "I'm more scared of what scares the Doctor than I am of her. Even when she's like she was right now."

Lorna thought of what _did_ scare the Doctor— which she'd told her once, though her daughter never could know. That soon all of space and time would be filled with Daleks— without any way to stop it from happening at all.

She thought of that, and knew she couldn't mention it. However smart your eleven-year-old was, there are some things she would never understand.

And if there was one thing they both needed less than anything, it was for everything to somehow get darker.


	4. Chapter 4

It was true: the world outside the TARDIS was boring. But it was also incredibly strange. The Doctor stood at the corner of the street for a while, watching the pedestrians go by with their faces turned down to the ground. No one was looking at the upturned dome in the sky. For a moment, she wasn't sure if they even knew it was there.

But they did, she saw as she looked across the road. One shopfront was a splash of colour against the grey, painted with a giant mural of the dome obliterating the planet. There was something oddly cheery about the style and the colours, and the world felt even stranger than had.

_"The Pub at the End of the World,"_ muttered the Doctor to herself. "They'd have to be into that book, wouldn't they? Not _The Time Traveller's Wife._ I could do with meeting my wife, round about now."

Hesitantly, she pushed open the door and went inside. In the pub everyone looked happy, and she was in the sort of mood where that made her scowl.

In the corner, a couple were talking and laughing. At the bar, an old man was cracking a joke. And near the loos there was the paper maché sculpture of a dome, its laser pointing at all of the clientele.

The Doctor sighed internally, and went to talk to the barman.

"A glass of water," she said.

"Unpleasantly like being drunk," said the barman with a wink.

"Y'know," said the Doctor, "I was really hoping that you weren't going to say that."

"It's a bit of fun," said the barman. "Not much of a drinker yourself, I take it?"

"It varies. I don't think I decided, this time round. But the water'll be fine," she added when she saw the barman's expression, "I'm not making an occasion of being here. I'm just someone from a planet far away, here to kill some time."

"Round here it's time that does the killing," said the barman. "Or so they say."

"That's true in most places, if you're willing to wait long enough."

"Yes," said the barman with a smile, "but here they reckon we won't have to wait long at all."

The Doctor looked at him like he was a particularly stupid soft toy.

"About that," said the Doctor. "The weapon in the sky. You don't seem much fussed, by my reckoning. Seems weird, to a girl from out of town. How can you theme a bar round your own extinction? 'The Pub at the End of the World?'

"Not a great name, is it?" said the barkeeper. "They were going to call it The World's End. But then people would think it was about that movie, and nobody really likes that. Here, we're all more about the book."

"The book," repeated the Doctor wearily, not bothering to say it as a question. Of course she knew which novel this planet was influenced by— and how, just like everywhere else in the universe, people wouldn't need prompting to start talking about it.

"It's a great book!" the barkeeper said happily. "Don't know if you've read it."

"Of course I've read it," said the Doctor. "Everyone's read that book."

"What happens in it, see," continued the barkeeper as he ignored her, "is there's these people, and they want to know the answer to this really giant question! And they've all been wondering what it is; they think it's really profound. But in the end it doesn't much matter at all! Because the answer, right, it's only"—

"Look, I've had a really bad day," said the Doctor. "I don't need this going and making it worse."

"But it's _funny_, isn't it? It's like it's saying that there's absolutely no meaning to anything! So maybe it's fine, if we're all about to die."

"That's not what it was saying," said the Doctor. "That wasn't his point at all."

She frowned.

"Was that really enough for you?" she said. "Shouldn't you be frightened?"

"Of what?" said the barkeeper. "Literary analysis? I'm not thick, you know, just because I work in a pub."

"Not that! The thing in the sky; the big leaden dome pointing down.

"Not really. Not because of the book, either. The truth is, even with all this talking about the end of the world; nobody expects it to actually happen. Something will stop the worst of it, before it comes."

"I'll try," said the Doctor, who was getting tired of being the something.

She sighed, and looked around the pub for something that wasn't apocalyptic. She was rewarded soon enough. A sleepy-looking woman held a long leash in her hands, which stretched right into the wall and kept going as a shadow.

The Doctor looked at the dog attached to the lead. It was nothing but a shadow, though it didn't seem to mind: it was barking happily in its two-dimensional way.

"Like it's made of the shadows of hands," said the Doctor, stretching out her own to confirm. "Just like a shadow puppet, only real. That's not in the book," she added dumbly.

"Of course it isn't," said the barman, rolling his eyes. "We just _like_ the book. It's not the same as actually being in it." He shook his head. "Must be something in the water, where you're from."

"Awful stuff," said the Doctor. "That's why I asked for yours. And there's something else I need, as well. Directions."

She handed the invitation over to the barman, who unfolded it with a frown.

"This'll be tricky," he said. "Hard to get to."

"The Central Theatre? I thought it sounded pretty central."

"Getting to the Theatre's no bother. It's getting to eight 'o clock that's the trouble. Days like these, it's harder to navigate time than space. And eight 'o clock? It's when the world's supposed to end."

"Today?" said the Doctor as the barman nodded. "And you're not feeling a little bothered about that?"

"Too right I am. Eight o' clock? Isn't right. You'd think it would be midnight."

"Sometimes the end comes sooner than you think. Didn't you get that from your book?"

The barman shrugged. "I mostly read it for the jokes."

"Yes. It's a funny old world, 'till the day that it stops being there."

"This thing you're going to," said the barman to change the subject. "Is it a comedy or a tragedy?"

The Doctor smiled sadly.

"Dunno," she said. "If I had to guess? I'd say it's like everything here. And in your book, come to that."

She looked up at the paper maché weapon, which was curling apart under its own weight.

"Both," she said. "It's always both."


	5. Chapter 7

It wasn't very interesting, being stuck in an alien's time machine. Chris knew better than to wander its infinite corridors – she might get lost – or to push any of the buttons on its console— she might cause history to catch fire. Instead, she just lay on her stomach on a carpet, tracing its pattern with a finger to pass the time.

"Oh," said her mother from the other side of the console. "It's that book."

"What is?" said Chris, feeling cold as the damp of the carpet soaked her clothes.

"I've been watching this place on the scanner, being nosey. It's all based on that book; the one which people never stop quoting."

"We read lots of books," said Chris as she got up to look as well. "I don't know which one you mean."

"You wouldn't've read it, I don't think. But it's funny. It's about a man going into space, when the whole of the Earth is destroyed."

"Destroyed?" said Chris, feeling slightly sick once again.

"Yes. Everyone's going about their business, then aliens come along and blow it all up."

"That doesn't sound funny at all. It sounds really scary."

"Oh. Well, I suppose it does a bit, when you put it like that. But everyone was fine in the end. Not in the book; everyone died. But in the real world."

Chris shook her head.

"It's like with the nuclear weapons," she said. "It makes me think of everything being destroyed, but being helpless."

"But it isn't something that would happen!" said her mother, who caught herself as she realised where she was. "At least, it didn't feel that way when I read it. It was a long time before I knew there were really aliens. You weren't even born back then."

"That doesn't help," said Chris. "It makes it worse."

"You think things are scarier if they couldn't happen?" said her mother. She was making the face she did when she thought Chris was being Challenging.

"In a way," said Chris, when she'd thought about it. "People think it's fine, if you're scared of something that could happen. But it's hard when you're scared of something and feel it's too silly to say."

Her mother looked at her in a funny way, her former expression gone.

"Yes," she said softly. "God knows that's true, at that."

Her mother was keeping something from her, Chris then knew for sure. Something she thought was very stupid, but also too horrifying for a child to know— even a child like her, who had faced down alien skulls.

It was hard to think of how bad that something could be, after what they'd just seen of the Doctor.


	6. Chapter 5

It didn't take the Doctor long to notice a place where time was strange. Behind the pub there were overflowing bins, and the shadows they cast were wild and wrong.

As the Doctor watched she saw something orange dart between the stuffed bin bags, the colour of sunlight just before night starts to begin. It was shadow, but inverted— light picked out against dark. The outline of a rat, which might have been made out of hands.

She watched as it sliced at the tight skin of a bin bag. Rubbish spilled out from it, disappearing as it hit the rat. That was how they fed, then. Even here, life had found a way.

"Beautiful," she said to herself. "And disgusting. Those things do come together, don't they?"

She scratched the air in front of her with one of her nails. Reality here, was thin as a bin bag, too. This planet was the centre of something huge, timelines rubbing against each other like pigs in a tiny cage.

"I was right to be worried," said the Doctor with a sigh. "They learned about the book from _there_. The place that they should never be able to see."

The world was pale as tracing paper. She could see clear beyond it, though only for a moment. The Land of Fiction and the Land of Fact. Another place, which she'd tried very hard to avoid. It would be Very Bad Indeed, if she messed up what she was about to do.

She fished around in a pocket to draw out her SCALP(EL)—a Space Cutter and Laser Pointer (Extra Light). It looked exactly like an ordinary scalpel would, but she'd always pretended that was a coincidence.

Cutting an incision in space was tricky, she knew, even for a Time Lord with medical training. Get it wrong, reality started to bleed. That was the last thing she needed, with everything else going on.

She didn't have to worry, though. In the end, it was true what she said— she _was_ a very clever person. She just didn't remember the last time she'd really believed it.

The hole she'd cut in space and time flapped open. Cleanly, bloodlessly. She did good work, when there was no one around to look impressed.

"People always say I jump around the timestream," she said to herself. "Still hate when I have to do it literally."

She sized up the hole she'd made, then ran towards it and leapt. There was a sound like a slurp, and she was gone from the world.

Unseen, the shadows flickered and bulged around the bin. The rat made of light wobbled and distorted, shifting into the shape of a human hand. It flexed its fingers tentatively for a moment, light shifting its way through the dark.

And then it was snaking through the hole in space as well, and there was nothing alive at the back of the pub at all.


	7. Chapter 6

It was oddly warm in the TARDIS, heat beating down from a cloudless and unreal sky. Chris sat on an edge of the console, reading the Doctor's fanfiction to pass the time.

She'd expected the Doctor's writing to be strange. She hadn't thought that it would be this disturbing.

"I don't think Harry Potter would do any of these things," she said.

Her mother read a bit over her shoulder and very quickly stopped again.

"Good Lord," she said. "I don't think he would, either. And he definitely wouldn't use language like that."

Chris was looking past her mother as she was speaking. What she saw made her instantly forget about fanfiction.

"There's a tree looking at me," she said.

"Don't be silly, love," said her mother. "Trees can't look at people."

She paused, remembering where she was.

"Unless they do that in here, of course. In an alien way."

"The trees don't look at people here," said Chris. "But that one's looking at us anyway."

She pointed, and her mother's eyes followed her hand.

"Oh, yes," said her mother. "I suppose it is. Sorry, Chrissy. You probably should be silly, while we're trapped in a place like this."

A tree wasn't quite what it was, Chris saw. It was squat and wooden in the way that a tree should be, and leaves dripped from its branches in a half-hearted way. But there were scraps of blue paint on its squarish trunk, and its eyes were not entirely unlike windows.

If it was meant to look like the TARDIS, then it was a very bad disguise— but then a bad disguise was exactly what the TARDIS had always been.

"Are you looking at us?" said Chris to the tree. "It's very rude."

"I've always been looking at you," said the tree.

"That's even more than rude," said her mother, "that's _invasive!_"

"You're inside a part of me," said the tree. "There's nothing more invasive than that."

Chris could tell her mother was wondering if she could wrestle the tree to the ground.

"You're going to have to be clear what you mean by that," said her mother very coldly.

"I'm the Fleurlis," said the tree. "In a way I'm every TARDIS, and this wood. Like how the Earth is Paris and Nigeria, and you as well. And I've been watching the Doctor for all her lives, hidden away inside the trees."

"Everything you're saying is making you sound even more creepy," said Chris's mother.

"You can't have been watching that long," said Chris with a frown. "The Doctor said the forest only got here when she first turned into her. There weren't any trees when she was… whoever she was before that."

"That's what she thinks," said the Fleuris." But that doesn't mean it's true. "She's always telling you lot how stupid you are, isn't she?"

"My mother," said Chris. "She's nicer to me."

"She's bad with adults," said the Fleurlis. "She thinks they're all small minded. But everyone's mind is small in its own way. There are things that even a Time Lord doesn't know."

"Like how to tell Harry Potter stories," said Chris. "Hers aren't very good at all."

"No," said the Fleuris. "I was meaning something more metaphysical."

He frowned, and his brow made a creaking noise. "It wasn't about them being good, anyway," he added in an oddly defensive way.

"But Harry is nothing like the person she's written. It's all _wrong._"

"Of course it is," said the Fleurlis. "What would be the point in writing a story that's right? Those already exist. Hers doesn't."

He looked up to the trees that he said had always been there.

"In a way that's why I'm here," he said. "What she's writing and why she's doing it. She's told a great many stories over the years. I've watched them all myself! In a tasteful way," he added when he saw Chris's mother's expression.

"But," he went on. "What's coming. It means"—

He paused, thinking carefully about his words.

"What if there were stories that could never be told?" he said in the end. "Because they were hard, or sad. Not the best way for stories to be. So people hid them away, and that put them all in danger— because the longer they went unspoken, the closer they got to being real?"

"Then you'd tell them, I guess," said Chris. "But I don't see"—

"That's what she's looking for. The wrong sort of story. To tell it or to be it; I don't know which. But it doesn't matter, as she won't be able to find it. There's too much she isn't able to see."

"Like you?" said Chris's mother. "The pervy tree?"

"Like _you_," said the Fleurlis. "I came to you both, not to her. I broke my cover, because I know what you already _know._"

There was a long pause.

"Which is?" said her mother eventually.

"He wants you to tell him," said Chris, who'd met her share of irritating aliens.

"Oh," said her mother. "Then I'd say"—

She paused to think, and loosened very slightly. When she next spoke, it was in a softer voice.

"That she's in danger," she said. "More than she even realises. She's walking into a trap because a part of her thinks she'll just beat it; but she won't. It's what people like her always do. They see so much that other people don't that they don't see… what a lot of us would be able to tell them—

She gulped.

"She understands how she's doomed," she said. "But she still doesn't know that she'll lose."


	8. Chapter 8

The sky was the colour of darkness, yet shadows were still somehow everywhere. The Doctor walked through an endless alley as stars flickered on and off overhead.

Hesitantly, she took out her Smiling Spoon, her device that traced the shape of time and space. It wasn't smiling here, of course. The face on its head was clenched in a silent scream.

"Sorry, mate," whispered the Doctor to her spoon. "I'm not wild about being here, either. But we have to see this through, okay?"

Tentatively, the drawn-on face opened its eyes and clenched its teeth.

The Doctor waved the spoon around desperately, getting as much information as she could. It was true, she saw, what the barman had said. Here time was warped into a complex maze, with eight 'o clock bang in the centre of it all.

She was so focused on her task that she didn't notice the ray of sunset creeping past and over her, or what that beam might look like. The middle digit of an outlined hand. A literal finger of light.

There was the sound of something slamming against a wall, and the Doctor whipped around. The spoon in her hand was replaced by her scalpel as quickly as a conjurer's trick.

She jumped out of the way of the hand stretching over the alley, but soon saw that more were now arriving. Handprints of light were pressing against every surface, the walls and dirt groaning as something struggled to get through.

"Don't make me use this," she said, brandishing her SCALP(EL). It's Extra Light in more than one way. A laser this bright, it'll scour you. You might burn.

From everywhere around the Doctor, a whispering, wheezy laugh began to rise.

"Okay," she said. "Not really the reaction I was going for."

_"You aren't a creature of the light,"_ cackled the voice from somewhere. _"How could you ever command it, next to us?"_

"Like this, I reckon," said the Doctor, poking a tiny button on her scalpel's hilt. She screwed her eyes shut as brilliant light shot out from the blade, thinner and redder than any incision could be.

Closing your eyes wasn't enough, after you fired a SCALP(EL). Its laser could burn through almost anything, never mind your eyelids. The Doctor's world blazed hard with a red sort of pain.

_"We're handprints, Doctor,"_ said the voice in an unimpressed way. _"You can't blind us. We don't have any eyes."_

"You know who I am, then?" said the Doctor as she blinked away the glare, hoping the question would distract from how stupid her plan had just been.

_"We know who you aren't. We watch your existence. Covet it. Yet even you are a whisper of something more."_

"You covet being me?" said the Doctor, responding selectively. "You shouldn't. It's usually pretty rubbish, this time round."

_"Anything is better than what we are,"_ the whispers said, _"the people never born in any worlds. We were better than anyone who really lived— but now we grow bitter, as even the best people do."_

A handprint of light vanished with a _whump_, to be replaced by nothing at all. Not darkness, not even an absence. Just _nothing_, like the nothingness after death. Looking at it could drive anyone insane, so the Doctor studiously looked to the sky instead.

"Most things are real to some degree," she said. "In a place this thin, maybe even regrets."

_"You only travel in space and time," spat the voice. "You haven't felt all that our hands have known. The best of us condemned to nonexistence, while this world is ruled by the worst and the realest of all."_/p

"Is it, now?" said the Doctor. "Then I'm just where I thought I was."

"I don't want to hurt you," she added. "However horrendous I am."

_"Even your existence hurts us," the voice now spat, "you're a darkness that should never have been. A shadow of a story in the ruin of a box. Don't think that we don't know what you really are."_

"I'm the Doctor," said the Doctor. "That's the way that things have to be."

_"And were you good enough in the end, Doctor?"_ said the voice as more handprints collapsed into nothingness. _"To get to be alive? As real as anyone can be, in this place you've been called to now?"_

Hand-shaped holes were punching through the walls and the greying street. It was harder to focus on the things that were still all there.

_"You could just give in,"_ said a voice, and it wasn't the voice of the hands. It was something inside her, stuck in her. A thing that should have gone away.

"No," said the Doctor in her head. "I definitely couldn't."

_"Living as if there's still hope?"_ said the voice. _"It's a long time since you really believed in that."_

"True," she muttered silently. "But you know me. You _are_ me. So you know I'm not as good as any of those hands. And one of my flaws? It's that I never know when I should stop."

The voice of the hands spoke again, as if it could hear her thoughts. Maybe they could, for all the Doctor knew. There were so many rules that were breaking.

_"You weren't fit for life,"_ said the voice. _"No one who lives really is. Yet you tried so hard to be worthy. Would anyone think you were, here at the end?"_

It was a mistake, to try and make her feel bad. It worked so well to remind her of once before. Where every life she'd broken came back to haunt her. She'd cast such a very long shadow, when they'd passed by.

There were creatures that fed on the wrongs that you had caused. Which made you aware of everything bad you'd been responsible for, then fed on the guilt you felt as you recoiled. Creatures of shadow, which lived a long way from here. But for a guilt as great as the Doctor's, they might just all find a way through.

"Was I good enough?" she said softly. "I'll be the judge of that."

There was a door in the Doctor's mind where all her crimes went unspoken. She took a very deep breath, and turned the key.

She flashed an awful smile, then uttered a single word. For the first time, the voice of the hands sounded puzzled.

_"Pray?"_ it said. _"Why should we do that?"_

"Oh, I'm not talking to you!" said the Doctor happily. "You were right, all of it was true. I'm not worthy of people who walk in the light. I'm talking to _them_"—

–she pointed to something unsnaking from the sky–

—"to the things that lurk in the shadows."

She smiled, and pointed to herself with a grin.

"Prey," she said, once again. "Come and feed, why don't you? There's _so_ much despair up in here."

Her grin fixed as the shadow slammed down into her, and all the pain she'd caused came back as well…

...she'd had so many lives, but there'd still been so many deaths. _So_ many. From every decision; the easy ones and the impossible ones. The awful things she'd been shunned for; the worse ones that no one even knew.

"Oh Hell," she whispered as the shadow began to feed. "Oh _Hell_"—

She screwed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth, as though that would do anything at all. She now saw how nothing she would be enough to make up for the things she had done. She could never atone, not truly. The Doctor might be an oath that would save the universe, but it would never be enough to redeem her.

Somewhere, she knew, she'd been cleansed. Somewhere, this all fell away. That wasn't the world she lived in now, where the shadow was bursting and roaring from her, hammering against every hand of light like the sea exploding into a bath—

—the Doctor screamed, not out of fear, but in pain. A deep, raw, primal noise, frightening away the few hands that hadn't fled—

—and then there was darkness, and even the shadows were gone.

The scream turned into a sob, and she felt herself wobbling on the edge of despair. Just before she fell, she remembered she hadn't been the only one in danger—

—she panicked and scrabbled in her pockets, searching for her spoon.

"Oh God," she said as she fished it out. "I'm so sorry."

It was bent completely over and no longer had a face at all.

"Another victim of the Doctor," she said to herself. "My shadow must be even longer, now."

She'd got enough from it, though, before it died. She now knew how to navigate this place, and how to get to eight 'o clock.

The worst thing in the world would be to keep on going.

And yet, the Doctor thought, it still wouldn't be punishment enough.


	9. Chapter 9

Far away in an unreal wood, a human was having an argument with a tree.

"If you're right that big dome thing's about to fire," Lorna was saying, "then it's all even worse than I thought. She's only walked right into danger. _Literally!_ She's doomed herself, and she thinks it's bloody clever."

"Yes," said the Fleurlis gently. "So now the two of you have to save her."

Lorna scowled, then sighed very deeply.

"You know," she said. "We don't actually have to do that. We could stay safe in here; watch as it all blows up."

_"Mum!"_ said Chris, horrified.

"I'm just saying," said Lorna. "She's been awful to both of us."

"That doesn't mean she should _die!_" said Chris.

"No," sighed her mother, "of course it doesn't. I just have to let myself know that it's a choice. For my own sanity, or what's left of it."

"It might seem unlikely right this minute," said the Fleurlis, "but it's possible that she will return the favour. Save you, and everyone you know."

"But to save her we have to go out there," said Chris in a resigned sort of way. "To a planet about to get blown up."

"No," said the Fleurlis. "That was a terrible idea. Your mother was right about that. You need to break into that dome. To the weapon that does the exploding."

"That sounds like a bad idea, too," said Lorna. "Bet I'm right about that one as well."

Chris looked up at the tree uncertainly, like she secretly agreed with her mother.

"How would we get there?" she said, screwing up her nose. "Are you going to fly us in the TARDIS?"

"Not that," said the Fleurlis. "I'm afraid I wouldn't know how."

"Oh," said Chris. "But you said you _were_ it. Why can't you drive a machine that you already are?"

"It's only a bit of me," said the Fleurlis. "Your stomach's a part of you, but you don't know how to operate that."

"But you've watched the Doctor for years," said Chris.

"So?" said the Fleurlis, leaves falling from his shoulders as he shrugged. "You've watched your mother in the car, but you've no idea how to drive."

"Then what do we _do_?" said Lorna. "If you can't fly this thing and we can't get out of it, then we're stuck here, aren't we?"

"We are," said the Fleurlis. "But here is a place that leads everywhere, if you're with someone who knows the way."

He did something impossible to describe with a sound that was even harder to explain— a sound like a TARDIS might make, only somehow even deeper and more real. When it passed there was an archway that hadn't been there before, leading out from the console room and into the forest beyond.

"All of time and space," said the Fleuris, gesturing through the arch. "It's all here in the wood, if you know the right way to go looking for it. You wouldn't ever need a TARDIS, if you knew what this forest really was. But that's Time Lords for you. They're not always as smart as they'd like to think."

Lorna looked at him, her arms folded.

"You want us to go out there along with you," she said. "You want me to take my daughter."

"I do," said the Fleurlis.

"And why should we trust you?" Lorna said. "We don't know anything about you! You might want to eat us, or chop us both up into wood."

"I can't turn people into wood," said the Fleurlis. "That would be ridiculous."

"Sounds to me like there's lots you can't do," said Lorna. "For someone who wants to be saving the universe."

"No one's all-powerful," said the Fleurlis. "All any of us can do is what we can."

He looked right into Lorna's eyes, and his own eyes weren't tree-like at all. They looked as human as hers, and possibly even more tired.

"You're right," he said. "There is no good reason to trust me. Except that if you stay, you'll be trusting a story instead. The one that says everything will be fine if you stay here and hope for the best. That the Doctor will survive along with the world you know, because things have to work out in the end."

Lorna shifted her crossed arms, looking uncomfortable.

"So it's really only a question of which of us you trust," said the Fleurlis. "And if I had to argue my case I'd say that story's already betrayed you, whereas I've yet to do anything wrong."

Lorna glared at everything around them, as if that might make it all catch fire and then go away.

Eventually, she took her daughter's hand.

"This doesn't mean you should go off with strangers," she said to her as they started to move.

"I know!" said Chris. "I'm not _seven_."

The Fleurlis wore an expression that definitely wasn't a smile as the three of them walked together into the woods.


	10. Chapter 10

It was dark on the square where the Doctor had emerged, to a part of a city that should already have been destroyed. Clearly it was late – long after eight o'clock – but the world in front of her looked like it still existed.

Not much of it was conscious, though: curtains were drawn and shops were closed. Only one place looked open when she scanned the square— a shop painted in bright neon colours, somehow managing to look gaudy in the darkness.

The Doctor came up to the shop, interested despite herself. In flashing letters on the windows were the words _INVEST IN YOUR FUTURE: BUY YOUR OWN SKULL_, and she was thrown by that despite all the odd things she'd seen. Just when you thought you had a handle on the universe, it always found something new to strain your mind.

Her spoon had told her this place shouldn't be here. She'd expected the rubble of a broken world, not a shop that'd sell you your own skull. But she was nothing if she wasn't adaptable. Perhaps there'd be answers inside.

She pushed open the door and a bell tinkled happily. Shops always had bells in places as strange as this.

The room inside was small enough that it could almost fit into a real police box. There was a tiny carpeted space for customers, then row upon row of skulls crammed onto shelves. The colour scheme was strangely upbeat and the shopkeeper seemed to be, too. Nonetheless, his eyes gave him away. A skull could never entirely hide its brain.

"Good to see you," he said, beaming unconvincingly. "We don't often get people shopping at this hour."

"It's a wonder you've got anyone at all, in the circumstances," said the Doctor. "End of the world must be running late. Can't get the staff, in these planet destroying machines." Unless it's like the book says, of course. That time is an illusion"—

"I never liked that book!" said the man. "It's depressing."

"Yes, it _is_!" said the Doctor excitedly. "And nobody ever says. Maybe you see it, then, what nobody else here does."

"I've found my own interests, right enough," said the shopkeeper. "I'm much happier with a good, old-fashioned skull. It's too morbid for me, that science fiction nonsense."

"Ah," said the Doctor. "Right."

She looked politely at the skulls on the shelves for a moment.

"Has anyone told you your planet's extremely strange?" she said in a conversational way.

The man shrugged. "I mostly talk shop when people come here," he said. "Ask if they want to handle the merchandise. It's not the same, 'till it's your own skull that you're holding. It's a very interesting process to get your skull in your own hands. Takes some cutting-edge temporal engineering"—

"I'm sure," said the Doctor. "It sounds pretty pricey to me. I've had a lot of skulls, and I doubt you'd do a discount for the set."

"Owning someone else's isn't the same," said the shopkeeper as he misunderstood her. "That's what I didn't understand until I got mine."

He nodded to the skull just beside his till, which wore the same pink baseball cap as him.

"That's it right there," he said. "You can tell because of the hat."

"Of course," said the Doctor. "I assumed you just sold those hats here, because I'm an enormous idiot. But I now see that of course they imply this skull is in fact your own."

"It is," said the man proudly.

"Good. I'm an alien, you know?"

"No!" laughed the man. "Then no wonder you think we're all strange. We don't get many tourists to our world."

"It's a hard place to find. But in the mad old bit of the universe I'm from, there's not much that'd be more morbid than _owning your own skull._"

"I don't see why. It exists, doesn't it? So I wasn't vapourised by a dome. It all worked out fine, just as we knew it would"—

She heard it for the first time, then. The note of panic in his voice, like he was pleading with her. The one her patients used when she'd been on the wards, when she'd had to tell them the lump in their chest was fatal.

She was the Doctor first and a doctor second, but at the end of the day she was still a qualified psychiatrist. In a situation like this, it might be an idea to psychiatrise.

"You're scared", she said softly. "All of you are."

"I'm not," said the man. "I've got my skull!"

"I get it!" said the Doctor. "The stories you've told of your lives, they can't contain that dome and what it means. So you're holding onto something else; it's the only way you can carry on. But it isn't working, is it? The skulls aren't quite enough to stop the fear."

"They are too!" said the shopkeeper. "It wasn't me who had the idea. They had them in the world the book was from— a long time ago, before it was even written. Skulls on their desks, so they'd never once forget. _Remember you will die_."

"Yes," said the Doctor. "But that's not what you're saying at all"—

"Of course it is!" cried the man. "However bad things seem, you have to hold onto something. Remember that you'll die, after a good long life, remember how you'll leave behind a skull. It doesn't just _stop._ It can't, not when it's us."

"That's not what it meant," said the Doctor. "Everything here, it's not what any of it means."

"And what makes you so sure of that?"

"Because I don't think I'm what I mean anymore, either. Everything here, it's wrong, but without getting through it there's no way back to it being right. And I think you're so calm"–

She swallowed.

"Because you're all far more scared than you've ever been."

The man looked at her desperately, eyes sunk into a skull that was still alive.

"Please don't make me think it," he said. "Don't make me go there. Thinking that, losing the future. It'd be the most awful thing."

The Doctor shook her head. "It's the not thinking that's worse. When you act like nothing's wrong, stop seeing what it really means. So you find yourself with a doomsday over your head, and all you can think to to is quote its jokes. And what's almost as bad," she went on, "when you do that it's not even very funny."

"Of course we joke," said the man very quietly. "What else do we have, if we aren't even able to laugh?"

"You have me," said the Doctor. "Whatever happens now, I promise that you will have me. I'm not sure I can stop it; there might be no hope left at all. But whatever happens you have to know that I _am_ going to try."

"Nobody's trying," said the man. "Nobody knows where to even begin."

"Well, that's as maybe. But I'm the Doctor. I'm qualified in this sort of thing.

She looked around at the skulls, whose owners lived nonexistent lives. They were symbols of hope, but the hope had gone taut like a weight: the fear at the heart of it growing until the whole thing was too heavy to bear. Where there was death, there was hope. But if you couldn't look right at the both of them, then you might soon see neither at all.

"It's not real," she said. "The future they're from doesn't happen. It's broken, all a trick. But then there's a part of you knew that knew that already."

The shopkeeper wasn't speaking, or looking towards her eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't want to take hope away. But I don't know where to go, and to keep going… I need someone able to see."

The man's jaw clenched tight against his grief.

"It's ten o' clock," he said in the end. "So if all you said was true, and this place should never be real. To get to anything that was true, you'd have to go"—

"Backwards," said the Doctor. "That's the heart of it, isn't it? The man at eight 'o clock should be buried back in time. But he never really died, and somehow he's different now."

"You can't turn away," said the man. "It doesn't work if you do. I know that, at least, when it comes to facing fear."

"No," said the Doctor. "We have to move forwards, even if we go backwards too.

"I'm already dead," said the shopkeeper. "Aren't I?"

"Yes," said the Doctor. "And no. Logic here… it's a bit like a dream. Everything is true, and nothing is."

"But I'm not the one that does the waking up," said the man.

The Doctor looked at him like he was drowning far away, and moved to hug him before she left.

"Not that," said the shopkeeper. "I hate contact. Just take a skull; doesn't have to be your own. To remember me once you're done. As a memento."

"I won't need that," she said sadly. "Whoever I can't save, even in a dream. You have to know that I always remember. And also, yeah"—

She looked up at the grinning skulls.

"I remember that I'll die," she said.

She shuffled backwards awkwardly, not quite knowing how to say goodbye. But as she began the shadows on the skulls grew longer, and the eyes of the storekeeper narrowed to points of light. Everything was different shades of black, slowly darkening away to nothing at all.

Sometimes in dreams a moment comes when you know where you are isn't real, and after that happens the whole world begins to dissolve. The Doctor felt like that as she took out her scalpel again, frantically slashing an opening as the place she was in faded away. For a moment everything was gone, then she was safe.

It felt strange to become the realest thing in a world.


	11. Chapter 11

Being in the wood felt strange to Lorna, like she was somewhere more alien than even the Doctor could go. She'd been to forests before, of course – a lot of them, when she was younger – but not one that was this far from anything human at all. It felt to her like nature might in a world where people had never existed, or been wiped out a long time before they could do any damage. For a second that was exactly what she needed, to feel distant, to feel distant from her species and her life.

"It's like Narnia," she said.

The Fleuris smiled. "A wood in a wardrobe where you walk between the worlds. Where do you think you'd get all those ideas?"

Chris gasped. "You mean the man who wrote those books _knew_"—

"Oh no," said the Fleuris. "It's just a coincidence. It wouldn't do if everyone with an imagination was just writing down things that they'd seen."

Lorna gritted her teeth. "Are you why the Doctor's so exasperating?" she said.

"Partially," said the Fleurlis.

"Is this going to take much longer?" said Chris. "We've been walking for a very long time."

"All of time and space is here," said the Fleurlis. "It can take a while to get places."

Chris glared at him with a look that could even melt wood.

"But there might be a shortcut," he added hastily. "Although one you would need to go looking for. If you could find mushrooms with caps in the shape of that dome, they would point the way to the place where it hangs in the sky."

"And you can't see them right now?" said Chris. "You said you were everywhere."

"No one sees everything," said the Fleurlis. "And I'm in no hurry to get where we're going. Time doesn't pass in this wood, not in that way. It could be eight hundred years if we go the long way round. You won't age, but you might get very bored."

"I'll look for the mushrooms," said Chris, sounding defeated.

She ran on a little way ahead, searching the long grass on the ground with her eyes and fingers.

"Eight hundred years?" said Lorna as her daughter ran away. "It is quite nice here, but that's a long time to walk in the woods."

"That was a lie," said the Fleurlis. "It's not going to take long at all."

Lorna looked at them. "But the mushrooms"—

"Are far enough away that your daughter won't find them for a while. Time isn't quite real here, I was telling the truth about that. Yet we'll still need enough of it, to talk about what she can't hear."

Lorna groaned.

"Not that," she said. "I've kept far too much from her already. There's only so many secrets I'm able to keep."

The bark face of the Fleurlis creaked as he gave a smile.

"I'm not about to give up any of my secrets," he said. "I only wanted to say that you need to keep a promise. Not to me, or the Doctor, or anyone who annoys you like us. But to her, Chris. To your daughter."

"I'm not in the mood for parenting tips," said Lorna curtly.

"And I'm not one to be giving them. I'm a tree, all we do is fling off our seeds and hope. I always imagined it'd be harder, to be a human being."

"It's awful," said Lorna. "It's harder than anyone says."

"I wouldn't know," said the Fleurlis. "I'm not someone who knows about anything difficult, like how to bring up a child or face work in the morning again. Only little things, like what you need to do to save the universe. And to do that"—

He stopped and listened to the forest for a little while.

—"you need to be honest with your little girl," he said.

Lorna looked out to the forest, feeling calm despite herself. Her body felt oddly at rest, given how she'd just run from a war.

"The Doctor said the opposite of that," she said. "That if the Daleks were coming and nobody could stop them, it'd destroy Christina if she knew. The way she was with the nuclear bomb… she was _terrified._"

"Perhaps she was right to be."

"Well, yes. Or perhaps it's to no end. The Doctor said it was wrong, to terrify a child when there's nothing that could reassure them. And if I'd trust her with anything, it's that she knows about children and fear. Why shouldn't I listen to her, instead of you?"

"There's no good reason to listen to either of us," said the Fleurlis. "We're a pair of idiots from a very long way away. Neither of us know anything about what your life's really like."

"The Doctor isn't always an idiot, though," said Lorna. "She's saved my life more times than I even know. But you still think that I should listen to you."

"No," said the Fleurlis. "I think you should listen to yourself."

Lorna sighed to herself very subtly, though of course the tree would be able to hear. He was _good_ at this, she knew; at manipulating her whole pretending that he wasn't. He was right, though. And he'd know how that would made her feel.

"It's not on," she said softly. "I didn't listen to Christina before when she told me she was in danger; it nearly killed her. I promised myself back then that I had to stop hiding things from her. It doesn't do, when it's something as big as this. But"—

"The Doctor saved her," said the Fleurlis, finishing her sentence. "If it had only been down to you, Chris would have died."

"I would've too. And the planet! But that… it seems less real, somehow. I got used to failing myself and the rest of the world. I can't let myself be fine with failing her."

"And the Doctor didn't fail her," said the Fleurlis.

"She failed us both," said Lorna. "More times than I can count. I trusted her with my child, and she let us down. I hadn't thought of it that way, not about this. That it might be her in the wrong, rather than me..."

She looked up at the Fleurlis's face as a ladybird crawled up his nose.

"You know"— she started to say.

"I do," said the Fleurlis. "I am very good at this."

Lorna laughed before she could stop herself.

"I hate you," she said. "But I expect you know that too."

"We'll have to be alone," she added. "I don't want you there listening to us with your woody ears."

"Yes," said the Fleurlis. "I'm everywhere in space and time. But perhaps this once I can make an exception. I won't be here until both of you are done."

Lorna turned to say something to that, but the Fleurlis had already gone; evaporated just like a police box without even making a sound.

"Perhaps he's not so bad," she said to herself. "Unless he's lying, and listening to me right now. In that case, he is so bad. He's probably worse."

But he wasn't listening, she somehow knew. Without her noticing he was doing it, he'd managed to make her trust her. All he had to do was to say she should do the hardest thing in the world.

She stood in the bright wood alone, waiting for her daughter to arrive.


	12. Chapter 12

The skull shop had been nearer eight 'o clock than the Doctor realised, close enough to be wobbling between reality and a dream. That was even more true here, in the street that she'd fallen to now. In this place, the universe was frayed as an ancient rug. Things that were unreal or too real might break through.

They clustered here, the people who'd never been born. She could feel them as they pressed against the world. Arms of light swiped out of the cobbles as she ran, each determined to drag her back to nonexistence.

There were shafts of light in the distance that could scare away the hands, far too bright for them to ever withstand. Handprints were thundering down the kerbside just behind her, painting it with colour against the grey of the night. Like a rain of paint, the Doctor thought, if it was angry and also hated her. She'd probably fought that, at some point or another.

She came up to a beam of light and threw herself in, not even registering the pain as she hit the ground. She exhaled sharply once she had landed, allowing herself to notice how exhausted she actually was.

"Oh," said a voice to one side of her. "You've come back again."

The Doctor opened her eyes, wincing as she was finally hit by the pain. There was an old woman looking at her disinterestedly, like she was a slightly unusual bit of rubbish.

"Have I?" said the Doctor, getting to her feet. "That's annoying. This place is exhausting enough, without running through parts of it twice."

The old woman looked at her more closely, studying her through the glass of enormous spectacles. It felt extremely uncomfortable, like being judged.

"No," said the woman eventually. "Not you. I'm sorry," she said. "I thought you were somebody else."

"I was," said the Doctor. "And now I'm me, instead."

"Everyone was someone else once," said the old woman in a matter of fact way.

"Yes," said the Doctor. "You're the same for so long, you forget it. Until one day when everything's different, and there's no going back anymore."

It was totally quiet in the shaft of light, which shone from nowhere between the flat brick walls. The handprints pressed at the light up at one of the ends, straining to get through to their prey. They couldn't succeed, of course. At least there was certainly in that.

"This isn't a part of reality," said the Doctor. "Not quite."

"It's not?" said the woman. "That explains where everyone's gone."

"Not really," said the Doctor.

The silence continued.

"You're not too bothered, then," she added. "This whole unreality thing."

The old woman stared down the glasses at the end of her nose.

"Doesn't make so much difference to me," she said. "I used to be left well alone. Didn't want to bother anyone. And now there's no one to bother. It suits me fine."

A rat made of shadow was creeping over her as she spoke, more claw-like than the hands that pushed outside. The Doctor pulled out her scalpel, hoping its light would miss the woman when it struck—

—and before she could fire the woman was stuffing the rat into her mouth, swallowing it with a loud _gulp_.

"Now the food here I don't like," said the old woman. "It never tastes of anything."

"It isn't anything," said the Doctor. "It's only a shadow."

"Then that'll be why," the woman said.

The silence came back once again.

It was very peaceful here, in its way, and the Doctor was an old woman herself. She could see how it might be nice here, if you'd finally had enough of it all.

"I'm sure you're a bright young woman," said the old woman.

"I'm older than you!" laughed the Doctor.

"You are? Then I must get to cleaning my glasses. But you're a smart cookie, no matter if you're old or young. And if this is all just shadows it seems to me— that there's an awful lot of light around, isn't there?"

"There's a lot of light in darkness sometimes. It gets trapped here, just like you. You should see how bright it gets inside a black hole. You need the kind of sunglasses they have to wear on the sun."

"Then you must be trapped here, too, if there's no way out," said the old woman. "You'll have to talk less once you settle in. I'm too old for the hassle of speaking to people."

"Don't worry," said the Doctor. "I'll be out of your hair soon enough. Some people say nothing can get out of a place light can't escape, but they're not any of the ones who've met me."

"Well," said the old woman, "that's a wrinkle. I'd assumed that you must be trapped here. It'd explain how you were there in that wall."

The Doctor turned to look where she was pointing—

—to someone talking soundlessly within the wall, lit up inside of it like an image on a projector. She wouldn't know they were looking at her; she couldn't. You could see her into her world, but she would never see you.

She looked odd, the woman in the wall. She wore a long, white coat that somehow never seemed to get dirty. She had enormous bright suspenders that were as happy as her face. And that face, of course, was exactly the same as hers. The face that would look at you in the mirror, if it turned out you'd been the reflection all along.

"It's not my eyesight playing tricks," said the old woman. "That _is_ you, exactly as I said."

The woman beside her looked trapped as a frog in a jar. "No," she said with a very heavy sigh. "That's not me, not at all. That's her, the real one."

She looked at the face in the wall, and nodded very slightly.

"That's the Doctor," she said.


	13. Chapter 13

Lorna was entirely alone in the woods, and in a strange way that meant she was special. If the Fleuris hadn't been lying, then no one had ever really been alone in the forest before.

She'd never felt like the sort of person who'd get to do something unprecedented: she'd felt awkward enough winning the English award back at school. A part of her still ached to believe that everything was going to be fine. But then that was more impossible than anything she'd seen with the Doctor.

Before enough time had passed she saw her daughter running towards her, her hands crammed full of thin-stalked and dome-topped mushrooms.

"I found them!" Chris shouted. "There's loads! They're all around a path, and it's not very far away"—

She trailed off as she realised the two of them were alone.

"Where did the tree go?" she said. "I don't remember his name."

"No," said Lorna, frowning. "I don't, either."

She could feel her daughter notice the edge in her voice.

"Something's wrong," said Chris.

Lorna nodded, both slightly and definitely.

"He knew we'd have to be alone," she said. "That's why he isn't here."

Chris fell silent and looked into the forest again. Her grip tightened on the mushrooms in her hands.

"Are you going to kill me?" she said very softly.

Lorna burst out laughing, despite everything.

"I don't _know_!" said Chris. "It's what happens in films. I thought it must be something awful, if the tree's gone away."

"It seems less awful now!" said Lorna, her laugh not entirely gone. "There's nothing that scares me more than losing you."

Lorna looked down at the moss that was carpeting the forest floor.

"But this," she said. "It's still pretty difficult, yes. There's something that I should have told you."

Chris frowned. "Is it that the Doctor isn't real? Stop laughing," she added, once Lorna had started again.

"Oh God," she said. "not that! Frankly, love, I don't think that'd scare me at all. It'd be easier, wouldn't it, if she went around not being real?"

"Not right now," said her daughter. "We'd be stuck in this forest, unless it was all just a dream."

Her expression suddenly changed, like she'd understood.

"That's what it is!" she said. "It's all"—

"No," said Lorna. "That'd be better as well."

It was too much to ask to be able to look her daughter in the eyes. She just stood and looked right on at the trees, hating them all for how beautiful they were.

"Then I don't know what it could be," said Chris. "You're not my mother? The Doctor's my mother?" She gasped. "The _tree_ is?"

"No," said Lorna. "It's not any of that. It's"—

She felt physically unable to say the words. It was all just too massive, so great.

Her daughter stood tiny in front of her like a judge. The way she might have done to her own mother long ago, when things had been different to now.

_"You have to be honest with your little girl,"_ the Fleurlis had said. Not with Christina, or with her child. Those were the exact words he had chosen to say everything he needed to say.

She'd sworn that she would do anything to protect her child. The least she could do was remember what it meant to be one.

She took a deep breath and let the sounds of the forest run through her.

"I was your age once, Christina," she said.

"That doesn't mean anything," said her daughter. "You still don't know what it's like for me."

"That's what I meant," said Lorna. "The world, it was different back then. It felt safe, like it hasn't done for a long time."

She moved to take her daughter's hand, and her daughter let her.

"You were very scared before you met the Doctor," she said gently.

"Of course I was."

"You were right to be, weren't you? You'd never have known what it was like for us. To live in a world where fear wasn't all that there was. I wish I could take you back there."

"You can. We can visit in the TARDIS."

Lorna shook her head. "No. It was… an innocence, in its way. Once you've lost it it's gone for good; even if you're only a child. I remember we used to learn"—

She swallowed. She knew couldn't let herself cry.

—"we'd learn about the world as it was before our time, when it hadn't been safe, not at all. And I remember thinking how lucky I was to live after all that danger, to not have to be scared like the children who lived before me."

"But that's silly," said Chris. "Of course things could get worse again."

Lorna nodded. "I know that now. But if I was still eleven, if I was your age now, and could see how everything turned out? I'd be _furious_ to know that it just all got taken away."

She took her daughter's hand and squeezed it gently.

"You're angry, aren't you?" she said. "With all of us. Everyone who's an adult."

"Sort of," said Chris as she looked awkwardly away. "A bit."

"Perhaps you're right to be. I should've told you that, if nothing else."

"The tree told you to say that?" said Chris.

"No. He told me to say"—

Lorna bit her lip, and held back her tears. A long way away a bell was beginning to ring, one that only sounded when disaster came into the world.

"It's funny that you said that," Lorna said to change the subject. "About the Doctor not really being real. It's what they'd have said to me, and maybe I would've been about your age. That magic and stories should all be put away, or else I couldn't face the world as it really was. Have a future. But that future was all stories too. That real world was never real at all. And this future isn't… it's not"—

She waved her hand to indicate everything, the forest and all of time and space.

"You know all this is real, don't you?" she said. "You've always known. Dinosaurs and galaxies, and whatever. There's so much more than the tiny bit we see."

Chris shrugged. "I guess. People don't often want to talk about it."

"I don't, either," said Lorna. "I want to tell you all that my own mother did. Say that reality is only mortgages and stuff like that. It's an easier world, isn't it? But you already know it's a lie. And the Doctor"—

"She wouldn't know what a mortgage even was," said Chris.

"No. She knows what's beneath all that, just lurking. However much we hide it or pretend. And she always knew when we were lying to ourselves, I think. Even if there's lots she doesn't see. The truth is, Christina... it's much, much worse than you thought. It's that of all the stories I've been told"—

—She looked to the ground, and sighed—

—"the Doctor was the only one that's true."

the distance there was birdsong like nothing heard on Earth, and underneath it Chris looked unimpressed.

"Is that it?" she said.

"And she told me something, the Doctor," Lorna added, "and I promised I'd never tell you. But she shouldn't've made me do that, and I shouldn't've listened to her when she did."

"She lied to me," said Chris blankly.

"She did," said Lorna. "And I did, too."

Chris scowled and kicked the nearest tree.

"Don't do that, love," said Lorna. "It's not that tree's fault."

"It's much worse than anything you said," said Chris. "It doesn't matter if you're real. It does if you keep on lying and lying."

"I'm sorry," said Lorna. "Really. I am."

"I'm not angry at you," said Chris.

"Chrissy… Chris. She thinks that there isn't any hope. That whatever happens the Daleks will end up everywhere, in all of space and time. There won't be any more Earth, or any more us. She doesn't think that there's anything we can do."

"Oh," said Chris. "That's not so bad."

"Yes it is! I saw how scared you were of the nuclear weapons. It's not really any different from all of them."

"It is," said Chris. "Imagining they were in the air, that we couldn't stop them." She shivered. "That scared me. But the Daleks aren't everywhere yet. We're still alive."

"But Chris. The Doctor said"—

"So what?" said Chris. "She's wrong about lots of things. She was wrong about this forest, and she was wrong about you. And if she was wrong about this as well, then showing her would be—"

"It'd be the most important thing in the world," said her mother. "But things aren't always like that, you know," she said. "Sometimes she's wrong, but she can be right as well. And there being a chance doesn't mean…" she sighed. "No way it's a definite thing."

"You're scared of it," said Chris. "Both of you are. The Doctor talks so much about hope, but she doesn't want to lose it. She stops thinking she could really win at all. Sometimes it means you'd rather lose than try.

Lorna opened her mouth to argue and then stopped.

"You're right," she said softly. "It's not only the Doctor, you know, who says that she isn't an adult. So many of my friends say the same, like we don't even know what it means. But it's that, isn't it? To put children above ourselves. Not our own fears or wishes, however much pain we might be in. And if the thing that scares us most is hoping— then I'll have to do it, won't I? I'll have to find a way to hope for you."

"Really?" said Chris.

"Honestly. I love you. And I won't let you down anymore."

Chris scuffed her shoe against the ground.

"I love you too," she said, very quietly.

"Come here," said Lorna, holding her hands out wide.

They hugged each other tight, not letting go.

"Stop looking at us," said Lorna after a while, not letting herself look up from her daughter's arms.

"Sorry," said the Fleurlis. "I'm so used to being everywhere. I don't know a lot about how to make an entrance. Have you talked?"

"Yes," said Chris in a muffled way. "We did."

"It feels strange to not know it for sure. I can see why you would come not to trust people, if you didn't see everything there was."

"But that's why I had to tell you, Chris," said Lorna through her arms. "There was too much you weren't being told. And God knows you've been lied to long enough."

"For my part, not everything was a lie," said the Fleurlis. "The mushrooms do lead the way to the dome. It isn't far now, not at all. And I imagine that both of you are ready."

"Good," said Chris. "I want to show the Doctor that she's wrong."

"Yes," said Lorna. "And we should probably save her life, at that. You found so many mushrooms, didn't you? You'll know where we have to go now."

Chris ran off ahead, pointing to where they should go.

"I thought that would be worse," said Lorna to the Fleurlis. "It's true, isn't it? It's never as bad as you think."

The Fleurlis smiled, despite himself.

_"What?"_ said Lorna. "What's Mr Ancient Wisdom laughing about now?"

"Only," he said, "that you're about to find out just how wrong that is."


	14. Chapter 14

"I'm sorry," said the old woman as she looked into the wall. "You'll have to run this by me again. That's _you_ in there. It is!"

"No," said the woman beside her. "She's the Doctor, like I said. It's not the same."

"But her face—"

"Well, yes, that bit's the same. And her past, mostly. But in a way she's like everything here. What we should be; what we really _are_. It's all out there, and here we're all able to see it. But we can't ever _be_ it, not really. We can only watch on through the wall."

The old woman screwed up her face as she tried to follow along.

"She's like your shadow?" she said.

The Doctor laughed. "I'm hers! A nightmare someone had of her, before she was fully formed. It's all a bit complicated, I'm afraid."

The light was extremely bright in the space between the walls, drowning out even the shadows. The Doctor took out her torch and it shone bright, too, though its light was near drowned out against the glare.

"The Doctor's universe is built on hope," she said, "but ours is a world that's made up out of fear. If there were places she couldn't come to, or couldn't see"—

She hesitated, unsure how best to explain.

"Were you frightened as a child?" she said to the old woman.

The woman beside her frowned, looking round to the pressing hands of light.

"Of course I was," she said. "Don't you know what happened?"

"I think so," said the Doctor. "I'm pretty sure I do."

"None of us thought there was any way that things could turn out okay. But they did, of course. It all comes out right in the end."

The Doctor nodded.

"Yes," she said. "That's the story that's kept you safe. But it's not always good enough for a child. Sometimes they need a story as big as _her_ there in the wall. For their own fears, their own lives. And if they were to tell that story in their minds"—

She shrugged.

"Then all of it is stories in the end," she said. "It all has to happen somewhere, that's the rule. He might not have written that book you like, if he'd ever known. Then so many lives would've been saved."

She paused.

"Though of course," she said very quickly, "it's not always a child who's calling. If someone somewhere had thought it, that when she was needed, when it was time"—

"I am trying to keep up with you," said the old woman, "but I'm still not sure I follow."

"Maybe all that matters is this. Somewhere a Doctor needs to come here, even though it doesn't change anything at all. And maybe now the Doctor's not strong enough; maybe nobody is. But if there was a monster that no one would ever acknowledge… then you'd have to fight it, wouldn't you?" She nodded at the wall. "She taught me that, when I was her."

She was looking at the woman in the wall with a stare like the man in the book, like she was looking at her home long after it had been destroyed.

"We're shadows," she said. "And we fell off a much bigger story. But that doesn't mean"—

The old woman wasn't getting any of this, the Doctor saw. She was listening out of politeness, like she might to one of her grandchildren.

"People don't understand what a shadow is," said the Doctor. "It's not ever opposed to the light. It needs it, it's built by it. A shadow's only cast when the darkness hasn't come. It's not the reverse of hope, is fear. It's what some people need if there's to be any hope left at all."

The old woman looked confused.

"I do have a question, if that's alright," she said.

The Doctor smiled. "Try me."

"If she's you, and you're another you, and both of you are from somewhere that's different from here," she said, "then where is this? And what am I?"

The Doctor looked up to the dome that hung still in the sky.

"You're doomed," she said sadly. "This whole planet is. There's no way to stop it, not now."

"Oh. But I don't _feel_ doomed."

"No. People don't, do they? The planet goes on for millions of years without you; there's a missile that can kill a city that's aimed right at your head. It's not enough to _know_ a thing is true, is it? If you don't feel it."

"You're telling me I'm about to die," said the old woman. "Although I am getting on, I suppose. Maybe I was going to anyway."

"It won't be long now, I'm afraid," said the Doctor, looking up at the laser pointing down. "It's almost eight 'o clock."

"Do you know that bit in the book?" said the old woman suddenly. "A woman works it all out; sees there is a way she can save everyone. But by the time she does, it's already far too late."

The black eye of the laser could have been staring at them, bleak like the barrel of a Dalek's gun.

"I know the book very well," said the Doctor. "I sent in some of the sound effects. And I know the universe might do what we'd all rather wish that it can't. But we still have to hope, don't we? That this isn't that kind of a story."

"Perhaps that's true," said the old woman. "It did all look hopeless way back then. None of us really thought any of it would work out for the best. And now"—

"You're alone in an alleyway, eating shadows," said the Doctor.

"I lived to be old. It's more than I ever expected."

"Yes," said the Doctor as she looked at the pressing hands. "And what you escaped is worse than you'll now ever know."

"Oh?" said the old woman. "That's nice, then."

"It's something," said the Doctor. "There's always a light in the darkness."

The dome hung low in the sky, great as the silence.

"It's late," she said. "Best be getting on. Sorry if you've thought I'm a little bit strange. I've not been myself today."

The old woman blinked, and there was silence. The odd person in the alley had gone away, and after a while the one in the wall was gone, too.

"I've no idea what any of that meant," she said to herself, when she was finally sure she was alone.


	15. Chapter 15

The mushrooms got bigger and bigger as the three of them followed the path that Chris had found. Before long the trunks of trees were replaced by enormous stalks of fungus, and on the largest of all there was a door.

"It wasn't so far at all," said Lorna. "Much less than eight hundred years."

"This wood is a very strange place," said the Fleurlis. "Everywhere is nearer than you think, yet all of it is very far away."

"Please stop talking like that," said Lorna. "We know how you're very clever; you don't have anything to prove. Both of us are too old for riddles."

"And I'm trillions of years older than either of you. Imagine how tired of them I am! It's how this wood works, whether you like it or not."

"It's 'not'," said Lorna. "'Not's' definitely where I'm at with that."

"Nonetheless," said the Fleurlis, "we all have no choice in the matter. This door is built around a riddle, and it only opens for the right people."

"Us," said Chris. "Me and Mum."

"No," said the Fleurlis.

Lorna let out an anguished cry.

"Then what was the _point_ of all this?" she said. "You made us have an emotional moment!"

"I'm glad we did," said Chris. "It was good."

"That's not the point, Chris. You can't go leading people around on a pointless quest. It's rude."

"It wasn't pointless," said the Fleurlis. "You aren't the right people, not yet. But you _will_ be."

"I agree with Mum now," said Chris. "You are annoying."

"You're very close now," said the Fleurlis. "Closer than the Doctor could ever come. But you're not there yet; not quite. It has to be exact if you want to open the door. You need to answer the question to become who you need to be."

The two of them glowered at the Fleurlis.

"What is it?" said Chris, her tone making it clear she was frustrated to have to play along.

"It's very simple," said the Fleurlis. "This door. Where does it lead? Once you know that, you'll both be able to go through."

"That's not a very good riddle," said Chris. "It goes to the dome. You already told us that."

"Of course. But whose dome would it be?"

"You tell us," said Chris. "You bought us here."

"That's not how it works," said the Fleurlis. "I do know, of course— but you have to know too, and say it out loud to know that you really know it. It's just the way that everything has to be."

"Why would we know who flies around in a dome?" said Lorna. "We've hardly seen any of the universe. Shouldn't you've talked to the Doctor, and left us both safe and alone?"

"That wouldn't have worked," said the Fleurlis. "There are creatures who walk in eternity, and none of them know what lies beyond that door. But you are an adult and a child. You've both seen things they never would. And if you're both honest with yourselves, you already know where it leads."

Lorna and Chris both looked at each other awkwardly.

"I don't," said Chris. "I don't think that Mum does, either."

"Not everything's a deep psychological secret," said Lorna. "Sometimes we really don't know."

The Fleurlis was bothered by that, she saw. Suddenly he looked less confident, like he was pleading.

For the first time they both noticed it, or allowed themselves to. The black mould on the mushrooms, the strange smell of decay. How the leaves on the Fleurlis were browning, beginning to fall.

"You've never done this before, have you?" said Chris. "You've not shown yourself like this, not to the Doctor or anyone else. You've come because you're desperate. And you're scared."

The expression in his eyes was enough to confirm she was right.

"So much of this was unthinkable to me," he said. "This isn't something that any of us ever do. That's what the shape of the Dalek means for everyone; breaking rules you hadn't noticed were even there. But sometimes that's simple, all the same. It can just be allowing yourself to say what you already know."

They looked at him, now more guilty than annoyed.

"I don't suppose it's possible you brought along the wrong people?" said Lorna. "You might not've noticed it, what with having so much in your mind."

"Put it together, from the start," said the Fleurlis. "Everything you know."

Chris frowned.

"Like you said, the shape of the Dalek is coming. But that might have nothing to do with any of this."

"And the dome's about to destroy that planet," said Lorna, "and blow up the Doctor who's gone there like an idiot. And they all really love that book, though I'm not sure how they even found out about it."

"Can you tell us which planet this is?" said Chris. "It could be a bit like a clue."

The Fleurlis shook his head. "It's not somewhere whose name you'd ever know."

"Oh," said Chris. "But it must still be important. History somehow cracked and then went wrong, and this is the place that ended up in the middle. But that's not all"—

"It's not?" said the Fleurlis.

"No. This planet is firing on _us_, on our time. It's breaking the future and the past, and everyone's going insane. They're getting angry all through the history of the world."

Chris paused.

"But there was one thing I thought was strange"—

"Yes," said Lorna. "There was something I'd wondered about, too."

They both said what deep down they had already known.

"I'd hoped it wasn't that," said Lorna after the door had opened. "Even now. That there'd be a way to avoid what it always was."

"It's not only the Doctor that runs," said the Fleurlis. "Or who knows that they'll soon have to stop."

Chris was looking at him as the words caught in his throat, at his flaking bark and his trunk that now oozed black.

"Are you going to die?" she said.

"I'm an all-powerful being who transcends time and space. And yes, I am. It's already started."

"Then thank you," said Lorna. "We were right to trust you, here at the end."

"It's a curious thing," said the Fleurlis. "I've lived for so, so long. Even a Time Lord would balk at it. And I'm still terrified of it. I very much don't want to die."

"Then perhaps we'll remember that," said Lorna. "All of us are scared now, aren't we? However much we tried to hide it."

Chris was looking through the door with apprehensive eyes.

"I don't want to go," she said. "It's going to be terrifying."

"No," said Lorna. "But we have to anyway. Sometimes it's awful, doing right."

"Thank you," she added to the tree. "And goodbye."

She walked through the door together with her daughter, away from the smell of decay.


	16. Chapter 16

Exhausted, the Doctor emerged from an alley that wasn't there. She watched as the shadows behind her shifted until they were just the suggestion of a street, until there was nothing left but a crumbling wall.

"So many levels of non-existence," she said. "I've now long lost track of them all."

"I'm lost," said a voice behind her.

"That'll be two of us," she said, then felt her voice catch in her throat. It was just a small boy, who stood on the street all alone.

She tried to start saying that he wouldn't be safe without his family, but stopped when she saw where they were. Behind them was the theatre and its enormous clock, which proudly showed it was almost eight o' clock. Nobody was safe anymore, whether they were with their families or not.

The Doctor gazed down at him with compassion. There was nothing she hated more than looking into the eyes of a child who she couldn't save.

"Stop staring at me!" said the boy. "It's creepy."

"I was just thinking about how you were going to die," said the Doctor awkwardly. "That's even more creepy."

"My Mum says there's no use worrying about it," said the boy.

"Maybe not. But I hoped just once I'd be able to save your planet. Even when it's gone as off the rails as this. Do any of you even know what it's called anymore?"

"Don't be silly," said the boy, "it's obvious where we are. This is the Earth; isn't it? When you don't know what a planet is, in the book. It always turns out to be there."

"It's not the Earth," said the Doctor. "It's not in danger this time."

"Oh. Then is this your planet, too? You might be old enough to remember it had a name."

"It's not. But you're less far off with that. Once I thought there was only one left of the kind of person I am. And I thought that of _him_, too. That however many of his kind there were out there, he'd be the only one you could ever call a person."

The boy frowned. "This planet's not a _he_."

"It's a man of your species I'm talking about. The one who's in that theatre right now. My greatest ever enemy, or the shadow of it. They call him _Davros_."

The boy shrugged. "That's just a name."

"That's what all good tyrants have in common. Once, their names would mean nothing to anyone at all. But out there, _Davros_— it means something that's worse than evil. If evil got smarter and a bit more full of itself, if it thought up a way to feel justified. He's what it means for the darkness to win. And he's the creator of the Daleks."

A bird was flapping across the sky that was shaped like the shadows of hands. But they'd never been human hands, however much they might look like them.

The boy frowned. "But you're saying he's from _here_. This isn't "—

"It is, though. This is the planet of the Daleks."

There had been other shadows everywhere all along, she now knew. Like pepperpots or rubbish bins, but always unmistakable as what they were. They haunted everywhere because they had to. But this was the place they threatened most of all.

"But we're not the Daleks!" cried the boy. "We're people! We don't want to exterminate everyone; we're just into an alien book!"

"That's right!" said the Doctor. "You're nothing like the Daleks at all. That's what makes this planet so astonishing. Or this version of it, at least."

She waved her hand to indicate the whole of the planet, far greater than the theatre and eight 'o clock.

"My people fought the Daleks once," she said, "and we ended up sure that they'd always happen here. In every version of this place, in every reality, whether there was a Davros or not. The Daleks would exist because they _had_ too, as much of a law as… gravity, or the speed limit. But one of us found some realities where they didn't. The very few; the drops in a billion seas."

She grinned.

"Infinitely improbable."

The boy stared blankly at her.

"Oh, _come on!_" said the Doctor.

She sighed.

"Point is. These places kept us safe. Gave us hope, 'cause they could hold it back. Everything in the universe couldn't become the Daleks, not with those planets resisting. But this might be the last one left, I think. And now"—

"Now nothing," said the boy. "Everything'll be fine."

"That wasn't what happened in your book," said the Doctor. "On every planet, in every reality. It didn't work out in the end."

"Yeah," said the boy. "But it was just a story. And everyone knew that there should be a happier ending."

"It was only the beginning," said the Doctor, "that's the bit that really mattered. One day there's an ending that isn't happy. There's a point when I won't be able to save the world."

"But it's silly, right?" said the boy. "None of it was ever meant to be real."

"Yes," said the Doctor. "But when something is very, very silly, you forget when it's also all true."

She looked up at the clock, which was now drawing close to the hour.

"Slightly less than two minutes now," said the Doctor. "That's a reference to"—

"Yes," said the boy wearily. "I know what it's a reference to."

"An adult would tell you not to be afraid. But it's fine, really. You can be absolutely terrified. Though perhaps I should be even more frightened than that. 'Cause the end of the world is one thing, but the man in there?"

She nodded at the door.

"He's Davros. He's the thing that's even worse."

"Than who?" said the boy.

"Than death!" said the Doctor. "You must've been following along."

"I meant the people up there in the dome. Who you think will destroy the whole world."

He gasped.

"Is it the Vogons?" he said.

The Doctor snorted. "The _Vogons?!_ That's ridiculous! No. You already know who it is."

"Them," said the boy, who finally looked afraid. "They're here to take back their world."

"Yes," said the Doctor with a sigh. "It always is, isn't it? Every time, it has to be the Daleks. When you look at that thing, then you just know it right away. A weapon as awful as that"—

She nodded up at the dome.

—"Who else could it possibly be?"


	17. Chapter 17

The idea had been beyond human comprehension— but that was par for the course at UNIT, where even the lanyards were alien. Even so, this one was particularly mind-bending: a weapon constructed over six dimensions! The plans meant the beam could fire on anywhere in time and space, and _beyond_— to possible futures where even a TARDIS couldn't go!

And what was more, it could do it without leaving the Earth. The bulk of what was known as _the Sixship_ was situated in London; in an unattractive office block just past the edge of Greenwich. It was there for some reason to do with the meridian, they'd said, though they'd never explained how that could make sense at all.

They said it was needed to keep the whole planet safe. Didn't everything feel so uncertain, in the world that they lived in now? But as Petronella Osgood looked through the window to another reality beyond, the woman who might not be human didn't think that she'd ever felt worse.

It was quiet in this part of the Sixship, and she was alone. She was now senior enough to have her own office, where worked on the paperwork they'd always say was important. But she didn't feel good about it, of course. It had been a long time since she'd felt good about anything at all.

She left her office door open as she went to get her ninth coffee. She'd never drunk much of it before, but now it seemed to do the trick: it kept her awake and would break up the day. Sometimes she would start shaking and get extremely angry. Drinking a dangerous level of caffeine meant she could tell herself it was because of that.

There was no one in this part of the building now. They'd have all gone sixwards to the weaponised part of the ship, to oversee the end of the planet they would soon destroy. She'd told herself she was too busy to be involved in that process. That was obviously a lie, but then so was everything else.

So yes, there was nobody here. But she now saw that wasn't quite true. A little girl and someone who must have been her mother were walking down one of the corridors. There were no children allowed on the Sixship, and there was no way they could have got in. But then Osgood was used to living in the middle of impossible things.

"This is just an office," the mother was saying. "Do you think he got it wrong? He was very confident and annoying. People like that can know less than they think they do."

"He wasn't wrong," her daughter said, with a certainty that wasn't like her age. "This is where he wanted us to be, even though it doesn't look like anything. The TARDIS looks like it's just a broken old box. This place could be sort of the same."

Osgood's guts dropped at the use of that word, which the child shouldn't have known or been able to use so casually. And her heart raced when the child looked over to her, like somehow even little girls were now a threat.

"You look very silly," the child said.

Osgood laughed at that. It was a long time since anyone had been that honest.

"I suppose I do," she said. "I wear this to remember something important. But I often think I've forgotten what it was."

"We were told by a tree this place was important, too" said the child, "but my Mum thinks it's only an ordinary office."

"It's an ordinary office," Osgood lied, her brain noting the thing about the tree. "Your mother's right to say so."

A part of her mind told her to leave things at that, and she ignored it.

"But it's a very private office," she added. "It shouldn't be possible for someone and their mother to get in."

She regarded them both through her large, thick glasses.

"How _did_ you get in?" she said.

"Ah," said the girl's mother, "we're here because, um. We're with, a, an agency—"

"We came here through the woods," said the girl. "Though they weren't really woods at all. The tree said they were all of space and time—"

_She means Greenwich Park,_ said a tiny part of the woman's brain. _She's seen the Observatory and become confused; she's only a little girl. It's better that you don't leap to conclusions. You certainly shouldn't go saying"_—

"This wood," said Osgood, risking everything. "I don't suppose it'd have anything to do… with the TARDIS?"

The mother looked horrified, unable to stop herself.

"How do you know about"— she said before she realised it was unwise to say anything at all.

Her child stared at Osgood.

"Are you the Doctor?" she said in a voice like she was asking for directions.

Osgood reeled a little at that. "No," she said. "Why would you think that? The Doctor's not"—

A million lightbulbs suddenly flashed on in her head.

"...but she is, isn't she?" she said. "The Doctor is."

She took a very deep breath.

"I'm not the Doctor," she said, "but I'm a _very_ big fan. And I think I might have betrayed her, though I didn't even realise I was doing it. But I still know her well enough that I know what she'd say to us now. She'd say we'd all been very stupid; have an insult about the size of our minds. But not to you, because you're still a child. What she'd say to you is what I'd tell you, too"—

"Run," she said. "For God's sake, run!"


	18. Chapter 18

The theatre was a great almost-circle, like one from Shakespeare's time on another planet. There were bodies everywhere the Doctor looked, and exactly two people in the building were alive.

He was sitting on the stage, Davros, every single seat in the auditorium filled with a corpse. He was grinning oddly like he be actually happy; black lips straining against his cracking skin. He was centuries younger than the Doctor, this ruined man. Once in a while, she would try very hard to remember it.

"Ah," Davros said through his awful smile. "Doctor. So nice of you to arrive on time. I'm afraid the other guests were—" he gestured at the mummified corpses "—rather _late_."

"That's the Davros I know!" laughed the Doctor. "Loves a macabre joke. One of those and a genocide; you've got the makings of an evening."

Davros's expression changed to a mockery of offense.

"For someone who spent so much effort to come here," he said, "you seem surprisingly dissatisfied to see me."

"And you won't like seeing what I am, eh?" She waved her hands up and down her body. "Looking like I do now."

"You are referring to the matter of your gender? _Doctor_. Our species are different at the cellular level; next to that such a change is but a trifle. You misunderstand me if you think of me as a bigot."

"Ha! Well. Where could I have got that idea? Don't worry about the man making species-destroying monsters; he's extremely _politically correct—_"

"My Daleks are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. You have forgotten what I said to you, when first we met."

"You say a lot of things not worth believing, Davros. I've only got so much space in my head."

He was smiling warmly, now, gently. He could be a wise old man indulging his grandchild for the last time."

"Sometimes I lie, yes," he said. "And sometimes I am entirely sincere. I think it is the second that scares you more."

The sun was low in the sky now, and red light was streaming through the high windows of the theatre. It lit the corpses in their wooden stands, making them look like they were already on fire. To the west in the sky and far above the sun, the planet-destroying dome glinted away.

"Peace," said Davros. "Whatever you believe of me, that has always been my goal. It cannot come to a divided universe. It requires the ascension of one people, one race. You have noble aspirations. Ideologies. Yet you are afraid to look at where they lead."

"And you created the Daleks. That's not a good argument for clarity of purpose."

"For instance, the Earth. Those people you care for above all, when so many worlds are on fire. I have often wondered what you would do if you ever had to _choose_, between the survival of that planet and the code you hold so dear?"

"The right thing," said the Doctor.

"I see. And how many who follow you still would, if they knew what that right thing was?"

"It doesn't matter a bit, 'cause what I'm standing against now threatens both. Everything turning to Daleks through all of time and space. Unstoppably. Irreversibly. And I bet it's because of you.

Davros managed to look almost offended.

"_Me_, Doctor?" he said. "I thought you'd be further along than _that!_ Do you mean to say you have not realised what is really going on?"

"The end of everything," said the Doctor. "That's a lot more important than the details."

"It is true what you say. The Shape of the Dalek. Have you ever asked yourself what that _is_, I wonder? What shape are my people out on that planet now?"

"It's a different reality here," said the Doctor, her hearts dropping into her mouth.

"Perhaps. Or perhaps there was something about this reality all along, that your mind was not ready to confront. Perhaps"—


	19. Chapter 19

"I always thought it was odd," Lorna had said, "that alien beam. She said that it was making people angry, but we wouldn't need that, would we? There's so many reasons why anyone'd be angry now. But the Doctor would never see that, I don't think. No matter how often people said, she'd never, ever see. She'd think it was… aliens in the water supply, or something. Anything to think things weren't as bad as they really were."

She looked up at the tree, whose expression was unreadable.

"That's the answer. It _isn't _causing it. It isn't causing anything at all. It was just us, all along. It was always us."

The Fleurlis was shaking his head, and Chris knew exactly why.

"That isn't it," she said. "Not quite."

She felt uncomfortable as her mother looked at her.

"The Doctor said something a while ago," she said hesitantly. "And I remembered it, because it didn't make any sense. That if something worked one way you might be able to flip it around, and somehow it would work just as well.

"The Doctor lies," said the Fleurlis in its unknowable voice.

"I know. But sometimes she tells the truth. So I thought maybe she was telling it this time, and more of it than she knew. There was a ray, or something, coming from here to the Earth. And it was breaking everything, because it was coming from a very dangerous place. But it didn't seem dangerous, when we saw it. It didn't seem much of anything at all. So what if it wasn't coming from there? What if the place she'd thought it was going was the place it was _coming from_ all along? What would happen if you turned things around?"

She frowned.

"What if you reversed the polarity?"


	20. Chapter 20

"It's not," said the Doctor. "It can't be, and it's not. The shape of the Dalek is _the shape of the Dalek_, not"—

"Time does grow strange as the shape approaches," said Davros. "Humans becoming Daleks and Daleks becoming men. Two warrior races blending into one. But we know, do we not, on which side the coin will land?"

"You're wrong," said the Doctor. "You've got this wrong, you have to have"—

Davros was no longer listening to her, once again caught up in his own explanations.

"A people whose anger is so great that it seeps through time, fracturing possibility itself!" he crowed. "Whose power to transform has transformed _my_

world, such is the level of their rage! You must know I saw much through my devices. Scattered through realities that will not be. As they guided that power through every possible future, it was not the Daleks whose shape I always saw."

He looked straight at the Doctor without ever opening his eyes.

"Tell me. The civilisations at the end of time. The last orders. Who _were_ they? Not my creations, and not my people. _Men_, Doctor. And women too, of course," he cackled, "for I have told you I am not a bigot. I simple believe what I always have. That peace demands the rule of a single race. But when it comes to _which_ race that may be… it is possible that my view may now have changed."

The Doctor's face turned to pure terror for a fraction of a second, then flicked back to what it was before. But Davros has _seen_, and they both knew that he had. It was an act after that, even more than it had been before.

"People aren't the Daleks," said the Doctor. "People _hate_ the Daleks! They're... they're everything they fight against—"

"Oh, they despise what the Daleks are; how they behave. But I do not think they would mind if they were to _become_ the Daleks. For every creature in the sky to make way for a universe made only for them and their kind. So many humans want for so much, do they not? As their future collapses, their hope fades away. Yet there is so much out there that can be taken. It might only take a small push to lead the way."

"Exterminate," said the Doctor, barely managing to breathe. "You think they'd exterminate everything just for _hope?_"

"Oh, they would feel guiltier than my creations; they would weep for it. They would disguise the truth of what they really are. But as for what they would _do_" — he smiled —"I think it would be much the same."

He looked up to the Doctor with respect, and for all she knew it might not even be feigned.

"I confess I thought your love for the human race a weakness," he said. "But now I know you saw what I could not! Blinded by the pride in my own creations. It is not through anger that a species will endure! Nor certitude, nor clarity of purpose. It is _denial_. To be able _not to see_ the extermination they enable— that is how the truly strong survive. We were not so different, in the end. You saw they were the image of your own."

He waved his hand absently to take in the rows of corpses.

"Everyone who inspired me is here, assembled in this theatre. Yet only the greatest of them has survived. You have challenged my greatest error, Doctor! There was never any need to make the Daleks. But at least there is still time to make amends."

Better not to plead for the human race, the Doctor thought. It was no use, once Davros got like this.

"I don't know how closely you've been watching your machines," she said, "but humanity's on its own now, and it's not exactly at _peace_. You think all that'll just change if they wipe out every other creature in the universe?"

"Oh, there would have to be changes. Rationalisations. Perhaps you would also look away. But that would not mean you would have no part to play."

The Doctor looked at him with wild eyes, genuinely stunned at what he might be saying.

"I did not bring you so far just to talk," he said. "I did it to make you an offer."

"Oh God," said the Doctor. "No. You can't mean"—

"Join me, Doctor!" Davros cried. "As _scientists!_ To bring peace to humanity forever; to save them all for good! One swift strike against the universe," he whispered, "and you will be more than worshipped. You will be their hero, to the end of time. And you will know that they _will_ still be there, until the last star has gone out in the sky."

The Doctor laughed at that, that same loud laugh of someone finally giving into insanity.

"You know," she said though the laughter, "it's funny. However much I questioned you; the things you said and did. The one thing I always thought was true was that you _actually understood me"—_

"Oh, but I do," said Davros. "How you have saved the world you love again and again, and how now you are beginning to lose. Tell me, if you were to die," he said, waving his metal hand, "is there the slightest chance that the Earth would survive?"

"What I am offering you," he went on, "is the chance to save it forever. No more alien invasions or things from the depths of time! Only that world saved, forever, by the hand of a woman they love! I wept, did I not, to think that we had not fought on the same side? But now we _can_, Doctor. Now we can fight together _forever_"—

With an apparently great effort he opened his eyes, to look his friend and foe in her terrified face.

"I have seen your choices through my many machines. You have sacrificed so many others to save that planet. But there is no shame in it, or in this decision now. It is but a step on a road you are already travelling. Seize it, and the human race will remember forever."

He stretched out his metal hand, inviting her to take it.

"They will always mark the day we stood side by side," he said.


	21. Chapter 21

"Better listen to the nice woman, Chris," said Lorna. "This isn't a place for children, or for me."

"But the tree said to come here," said Chris. "Because the Doctor is in danger; more than she'd ever been. And that if there was any hope of saving her… that we needed to come to this dome. Or office, or whatever it really is."

Osgood took a deep breath. "And where is she?" she said. "When you left her, when you came through that forest. Where is the Doctor now?"

"In a city full of broken time," said Lorna. "Under a strange and giant weapon that never fires. _Your_ weapon. It has to be, right?"

"Then she's in danger because of us," said Osgood, heart racing, "and you need to run, now. The woods you came through, if you could get to here. Can you also use them to get to the Doctor?"

_Of course not_, Chris was about to say. But before she could she heard another part of herself shouting, and that part's answer was what she felt she had to say.

"Yes," said Chris. "I think I can."

"Then run," said Osgood. "Both of you. Because I don't think you have long, even if you're time travellers. And I think your tree… I think he was right. We're all in a great deal of danger."

"That's what the Doctor said," said Chris. "She said we should be afraid."

"Then I'll have to get to saying that as well," said Osgood.

Chris and Lorna turned and ran together back down the corridor, back to the woods between the worlds.

Osgood exhaled deeply once they were gone, her greatest fears replaced by ones that were even worse. It should have been awful, but it was somehow validating, like the huge weight she'd been given had crushed one that was even greater.

She looked down at her leather jacket and herringbone scarf, the studded waistcoat underneath. And after observing at it distantly for a while, she saw that she was no longer dressed as the Doctor.

_"Destroy that world!"_ came a woman's voice from the speakers. _"Which holds against everything we stand for! This is my command, and the order from the highest office there is! Destroy it, by orders of the President of this world! By orders of the Doctor!"_

Osgood watched from the Sixship's window as the laser blast blew down, slamming into the planet that elsewhere had fathered the Daleks. Fire burned across the surface like a scab, and she knew that millions she couldn't see were about to die.

"Sometimes it's challenging," she said wearily, "trying to be a fan."


	22. Chapter 22

The Doctor was silent for a long time after Davros had made his offer.\p

"I was right, then," she said. "You never understood who I really was."

"An indulgence. Forgive me. It is foolish, I know, to gamble on so tiny a chance."

"No," said the Doctor. "No, it never is."

"The way forward will be more challenging without you," said Davros, "But I have made my preparations. If the Earth cannot have its hero," he smiled, "it may have to settle for another."

_"You?"_ said the Doctor. "Nobody's going to listen to you! It's a media culture, and you're just a husk in a chair!"

"How quick you are to fall back to my appearance," said Davros. "But you are right, of course. Strength of mind should come with strength in the body. And I am old, now, and weak. But it's not me who will be going there, Doctor. Not like this, anyway," he grinned. "Not with this daft old face."

The Doctor's face was ash as she finally understood.

"The Earth has been crying out for change," said Davros. "Perhaps it is not alone. It is past time, I think, that I should be renewed. To take another cue from you. To regenerate."

Softly against the fire of the sunset, the remaining hand of Davros began to glow.

_"NO!"_ said the Doctor. "You can't do that! You're not one of the people who can do that!"

"Oh, I could offer you an explanation!" said Davros with a face that was glowing too. "It was not such a complex matter, in the end. Like so often, it was you that gave me the spark. None of this would be possible, had you not shown the way."

_"YOU'LL NEVER WIN!"_ shouted the Doctor. "If you think the Earth'll just roll over to you then you know even less about it than you do about me"—

"Oh, Doctor. I do respect your courage! And I have enjoyed our talks, over the years. But I think, if we were honest, we always knew— which of us would win in the end."

The whole of his body was glowing now, every part of it that had not been burned away. The few parts of him that remained were pulsing and wiggling, preparing to knit themselves into something new.

"Your story is old," he said, anger rising as orange surged through his skin, _"BUT MINE! IS OLDER! SAFETY, AND PLENTITUTE! A WORLD THAT BELONGS TO ONE'S OWN! MY TALE! WILL BE TOLD! IN THEIR FUTURE! MY STORY! WILL LAST! FOR AN AGE!"_

_"I WILL BRING PEACE!" _he roared as light flashed from the thing in the sky.

_I WILL BRING ORDER!"_ he yelled as the windows of the theatre blew in.

_"AND I! WILL BE! THE SAVIOUR OF HUMANITY!"_

The man and the room exploded into flame.


	23. Chapter 23

Impossibly long ago and at exactly the same time, _The Pub at the End of the World_ was watching the clock tick round. As the minute hand drew up to the hour, the lights that hadn't broken on the paper maché dome began to glow blue and red. Everyone was smiling and raising their drinks, and no one was looking anyone in the eyes.

In the wall at one end of the pub, the shadow of a dog began to howl.

"She didn't need to go anywhere, then," said the man behind the bar. "Eight 'o clock's come here after all, without any of us needing to move. Shame, in a way. Hope no one's been drinking like there's no tomorrow."

He lazily cleaned a glass, glad his shift would be ending very soon.

"No need to lift a finger!" he laughed to himself as the chimes began to ring. "And it's all as we knew it would be. The end of the world coming and going, with no nonsense from that dome in the sky"—

The glass in his hand shattered along with all of the windows. He screamed as the paper maché dome crumpled, as his customers were flung to the floor. There was no noise, somehow. It must all of seeped somewhere else.

This was the exact thing he'd told himself would never happen, but he wasn't shocked, not really. He wasn't even scared. He could hear himself thinking that this happened in films and books, not to actual people. The thought didn't seem to be stopping it from happening now.

One of the women on the floor was looking at him like the impossible had finally come true.

"You haven't said it!" she cried, desperately.

"Said what?" he said. "We're all about to die!"

"You know. What the barman says. At the end… when it's the end of"—

She couldn't get the words out without sobbing.

"It's in the book," she said. "We don't have anything left without that."

It was a long time since the barman had made anyone happy. You could make sure you'd end on a good note, at least.

"Last ord—" he began.

The entire pub exploded in a ghastly noise.


	24. Chapter 24

The Doctor had been thrown to the floor by the force of Davros's regeneration, and metal constraints had sprung up to keep her there. Her ears were ringing from the force of the blast, but she could barely even hear how that was true.

There was a siren heralding the end of everything that had been blaring for longer than she knew. Once, it had been on the very edge of sound, but now it was screaming to all of creation; telling it to evacuate the universe while it could. Over the siren and somehow even louder, the clock above the theatre was tolling the chimes of the hour.

But the nightmare in the Doctor's ears wasn't mirrored in her eyes. The light was gone, like it had never been there at all. There was no cast away metal hand, no ruins of an old man's chair. There was just the person that Davros had become, calm like he couldn't hear anything at all.

He smiled delicately and she took him in. Young and handsome with a mass of curly hair. Yellow trousers and a bright red shirt. Crisply dressed. Perfectly groomed. A heartthrob with a genocide underneath.

Davros inhaled deeply and sighed. Everything was on fire now, but he hadn't noticed. He could have been breathing in the smell of a garden instead of the smoke and fumes.

"There is no pain," he said softly. "I had forgotten that. To move, to speak, and all of it without effort. To be new!"

He laughed, then guffawed, then threw out his hands with delight.

She had to hold him here, if nothing else. If the best she could do was make sure that they both died together: in its way that would still be a victory. She'd take him down and leave the rest to hope. As long as she didn't think of Chris, or ever of anything human.

"That's not you," she said. "What you've become, it isn't what you are. You were proud once; you had a dignity."

"I was _past it!_" barked the man, sounding nothing like Davros when he did. "I was old."

"Yeah," said the Doctor. "But old isn't always bad. It was your thing."

The man in front of her smiled, very slightly.

"Perhaps that's what Davros always was," he said. "Old and weak and very far away. But everyone has the ability to change, do they not? Or should I say," he smiled, "don't they? And when one sets out on a very big adventure, perhaps it's time to take on a whole new name"—

The unburning curtain on the stage pulled back and the Doctor's eyes widened in horror, as every hope she had in her finally died...

...and the man in front of her turned round to his bright blue police box, bigger and bolder than any she'd ever seen. And he grinned the giant smile of a man who always wins…

"I'm the Doctor," he said. "And I'm going to save the world."

_The Doctor's story ends in SURVIVAL._


End file.
